Power line communications under Rayleigh fading and Nakagami noise: novel insights on the MIMO and multi‐hop techniques

Abstract

This work targets a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the serial-relaying and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) fading mitigation techniques on the performance of indoor power line communication (PLC) systems. While these techniques were studied extensively under additive Gaussian noise, we aim at highlighting the implications of Nakagami-like noise on the achievable performance levels. The author derive approximate closed-form expressions for the bit error rate (BER) under Rayleigh fading and Nakagami-m background noise where the obtained approximations are very close to the exact BERs. The derived expressions are useful for evaluating the achievable diversity orders and for relating the BER to the main parameters of the PLC system in a direct and intuitive way. In this context, we analytically prove that MIMO doubles the diversity order with different combining schemes while the diversity order of a system under Nakagami-like noise is only half the diversity order that would have been obtained under Gaussian noise. The author also shows that multi-hop relaying does not enhance the diversity order.